From combined dispatches
GENEVA — A U.N. team has left Geneva on a delayed trip to explore claims of atrocities by government-backed militias in Sudan’s western Darfur region, the United Nations said yesterday.
The news came a day before the U.N. human rights watchdog turns the spotlight on what is being called today’s worst humanitarian disaster.
“A fact-finding team from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights left Geneva late [Tuesday] for Sudan to continue its [inquiries] into the situation of human rights in the Darfur region of the country,” said a UNHCR statement.
Khartoum initially blocked the five-person mission, which spent more than a week in neighboring Chad this month interviewing refugees from Sudan who escaped ethnic cleansing by Arab militias in Darfur.
But the government reversed its decision before a scheduled vote today at the U.N. human rights forum in Geneva on a resolution condemning widespread violence in Sudan. Bertrand Ramcharan, acting high commissioner for human rights, delayed the text’s release, which might have coincided with the commission’s vote on the resolution, until the team completes a second trip to the region.
Sudan is to take center stage today at the Human Rights Commission after several delays over the past week as the 53-member panel takes up the claims of violence in Darfur.
A draft resolution by the European Union expresses concern about “the grave violation of human rights and international humanitarian law in Darfur, in particular reports of systematic attacks on civilians, targeting of villages and centers for internally displaced persons.”
Sudan has denied arming the Arab militias that have looted and burned African villages, perhaps displacing a million people in Darfur and sending 100,000 more fleeing across the border to Chad. Around 10,000 people are also believed to have died in more than a year of fighting.
In another development, Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Ismail, announced in Khartoum that Vice President Ali Osman Taha will return to peace talks in Kenya this week with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Mr. Taha left the talks last Saturday over a deadlock on the legal status of Khartoum, after the SPLA insisted on maintaining its demands for southerners in the capital to be subject to secular law, rather than Islamic law.
U.S. officials have voiced mounting frustration with the slow pace of the negotiations aimed at ending Africa’s longest-running conflict, and this month briefly recalled their representative from the talks.
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